Acer W3-810 at a knockdown price

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After I buy something technical one of two things usually happens:

  • They stop making it
  • It plummets in price

I think with the Acer W3-810 tablet it might be both of them. Although it has only been out around six months I reckon that there is a refresh due and the price has collapsed accordingly, to a very interesting 179 pounds from PC World. This is stonkingly good value for a full fat Windows 8 tablet. Mine is now my travelling companion of choice. Eminently portable, excellent battery life for watching movies on the go and the ability to run splendid little programs live Live Write so that I can blog about what I see when I get there.

Downsides? Well, the 8.1 inch screen is not optimal if you are the sharing type, as the range of viewing angles is not the best, and the Atom processor and 2G of RAM means that it chugs a bit when running larger programs. I had Photoshop Lightroom on it for a while and the best thing you can say is that it gets there in the end. Mind you, having said that Lightroom can pretty much bring any machine to its knees just by importing a few pictures. I’ve heard of one brave soul running Visual Studio on it. Apparently it is possible, but of course with it being based on the 32 bit x86 architecture you will not be running any Windows Phone emulators any time soon…

If you are in the market for something portable and useful you could get a lot worse. If you think about it, that’s actually less money than a Nexus 7, for a machine that is actually properly productive, with Microsoft Office and the ability to print things out.